Frank LaFone's Journal

My stupid friend came over today to see if we can get Kaylee started. I’ve decided to stop referring to my stupid friend as stupid in the fear he may stop answering my emails, calls, texts, and doorbell rings at 4am. Hence forth I shall refer to him as the entirely made up name of John (as far as you know, at least). I’ve mentioned before that John and I go way back. We’ve been friends for as long either of us can remember. It started in pre-school and we’ve been partners in crime ever since. He is a year older than me, except for a week and a half at the end of January, when he’s TWO whole years older than me, a fact I once lamented but now revel in as we get older. Honestly, although I’m an only child, he’s one of my brothers (the stupider friend is the other one, but more about him later).

If someone wanted one word to describe John and I – separately or as a unit – that word would be ‘Nerd’. Unless it’s ‘Geek’. Also ‘Dork’ does a decent job if I’m honest. The point is we’re not exactly what you’d call cool. We come from an age way before Geek Chic. Way, WAY before. We basically predate any positive connotation associated with the word in written or spoken form. We’ve always been at the bottom of the social food chain. In fact, from our perspective the social food chain was a dot and that dot was always above us. There’s a certain degree of freedom at the bottom because nobody can really judge you who isn’t already judging you for something else anyway. Why not go nuts and just wallow in it?

My first nerdemory with John happened at around age eight or so and it was watching a guy do a demonstration of fencing at camp. We immediately became hooked on swords in just the way you don’t want your average eight year old kid to be hooked on sharp, pointy things. The fascination never really stopped, although both of us were way too uncoordinated to pick up fencing. This may have influenced us a few years later when we discovered this weird game you couldn’t win called Dungeons and Dragons. I say game because most people think of it as such. We’d probably have used the words “lifestyle choice”, “obsession”, “all-encompassing universe into which we devolved for days at a time”, or “way to ensure virginity until college”. Those are more accurate descriptions, frankly. Snicker all you like but D&D shares a number of oddly reminiscent similarities to being a gearhead.

D&D is a game of perception layered over hard numbers. You create a unique persona that you inhabit in the game and that persona becomes your identity. It’s your lens on the world. Despite having nothing but a game full of misunderstood dark elf rangers, everyone is slightly different because they bring something to the table. Your character might be the same as someone else’s, but you’ve decided to buck the trend and not carry a bow at all. Or maybe you’ve got a perchance for shiny red boots. Perhaps you spend some time being a thief instead of a ranger. The point is, this character becomes an articulation of yourself. To the outside observer it may not make a lick of difference which nerd to wedgy first but to those in the know, the interesting things happen at the edges. The beauty is hard numerical scores underpin all of this, and let me tell you, D&D loves its numbers. THAC0, ability scores, damage rolls, saving throws, opposed checks, skill checks, luck rolls, initiative. No matter how you tinker with it, a number defines how quick or strong or smart your character is capable of being. We can debate about the nuances, but the facts is the facts, and those facts define the range of possibilities for expression. No matter what you do, a magic user ain’t gonna slog it out with a paladin in hand to hand combat. He’s gotta get creative.

Cars are remarkably similar. You can take any two classic cars of the same make, model, and year and put them side by side. The average observer will look at them and think one is red, the other is white, but they’re the same. But no! Gearheads know otherwise. The red one has an electronic distributor while the white one decided to keep it stock. The white one has a beautiful tan leather interior, but the red one uses a cheaper vinyl so they had enough money to get cylinders bored out to get a little more power. They’re basically the same car but they’re totally different cars because they reflect the strengths and interests of the owners in question. I love going to big car shows not just to look at all the different type of cars, but to look at what choices owners make and talk to them about their choices. Why did you get that valve cover? Where did you find an aluminum radiator? You mean you can actually put Miata seats in this type of car? Car culture is great because its’ a big community of people that want to talk about their hobby. They want to share ideas and approaches and crazy stuff. And it’s just like D&D in that it takes a group of people working together to make the magic. Yet it’s still underpinned by hard numbers. Brake Horsepower, so many degrees of top dead center, spark plug gap, wheel size, gear ratios, volts & amps, power range, revolutions per minute. All of this stuff tells you the limits of your car. No matter what you do, there ain’t a stock MGB on the planet that’s going to beat a stock muscle car in the ¼ mile, and that’s perfectly ok. Each of those has a different role and a different purpose in the garage. It just means you gotta get creative.
John and had to get creative with Kaylee if we were even going to get her started.

First things first – the battery. I’ve already detailed the trials and tribulations with the battery, but we did have a path forward. Electricity is a wonderful thing because it can work in serial. What that means is that if you can hook the power source to another power source, you might be cooking with Crisco, as my dad would say. John had a battery in his garage so he brought it over to see if it’d run Kaylee. It would have worked like a charm too if it weren’t dead. Luckily it was simply drained, not deader than Custer’s toupee dead, and we had a solution for drained. What if we hooked jumper cables from the power leads on Kaylee to the dead battery, then plugged in the battery charger (which has a jump setting) and hooked it to the dead batter at the same time? That’s just crazy enough to work!

Incidentally this is how I found out the clock still works.

MGB’s work a little different many cars. When you turn the key on to the first position, the first thing that happens is that a fuel pump in the truck near the fuel tank starts up. This pumps the fuel forward to the engine to run. This pump sounds nearly exactly like the old clackity version of the Price Is Right Big Wheel and serves the exact same function, which is determine whether or not you get to go to the final showcase to get a working car. The fuel pump turned on ok, which was encouraging because frankly, I’m not sure either of us thought it’d get anywhere near that far. The next step was to turn the engine over and listen to the purring sounds of a fully workable, tuned engine. At least that was my expectation and I think John’s silent hope. What can I say, we’re optimists. It shouldn’t surprise anyone who has any experience at working on a car for more than 5 minutes to hear Kaylee didn’t start. At all. She did ‘turn over’, which is a kind of weird phrase if you think about it. Most of the time we really don’t want cars to turn over. In fact most (not Kaylee) have safety features to handle the extreme experience of turning over. After most turn overs, you expect to be handed a stack of insurance papers and hopefully a new pair of underwear. But when we start cars, turning over is a good thing. Kaylee most certainly would turn over, but she wouldn’t catch. Or fire. Or kick. It’s kinda cool we have so many words that nicely say, “Damn thing won’t start”. Car terminology can be weird.

There are lot of things that have to work to get a car to run, and most of them have to happen in under a second or two. The coil has to draw power from the battery, which in turn makes the started work. The carburetor sucks some fuel and mixes it with air then shoots it into the cylinders. The distributor has to trigger the spark plugs at the correct time to cause a bang to push the cylinder down. That provides power and sucks out the waste to the exhaust. Then it does the whole thing over again (except the starter part) in the blink of an eye. That’s pretty impressive that a car can do all that in that little time. Most of the time we get into a car we crank the engine (or increasingly push the button), magic happens, we put the transmission into ‘go’ and just drive, never once stopping to think about all these steps. Maybe that’s a good thing because thinking about that many tiny explosions a few feet in front of you might be a bit scary. Maybe it’s bad because it makes us too disconnected with our cars. It makes them convenience devices like a DVD player or an iPod, not these wonders of mechanical and chemical complexity they should rightfully considered. I’m not a philosopher and I don’t know the answers to these weighty questions but what I do know for a fact is that you never, ever have a greater appreciation for all the magic little steps working together in perfect harmony as when the magic stops, they don’t get along, and it’s on your head to figure out the whys to be fixed. All of that is a fancy way of saying Kaylee wouldn’t start and we didn’t know why.

The kludged ‘battery’ source was working because the clock worked (John will tell you the fuel pump, engine turn thing but I stand by the clock standard). The starter was working because the engine turned. That also meant the cylinders where going up and down like they’re supposed to. The only thing left was the boom. There was no boom. A good boom needs two things – boomable fuel and something to light the boomable elements in the fuel. We were pretty sure we had fuel because the fuel gauge read almost empty. It is an immutable law of driving that ‘almost empty’ isn’t empty and that means you have fuel. We weren't so sure about the spark.

Remember how I said car work and D&D are oddly similar? Knowing the right number at the right time for the right situation is one of those similarities. The THAC0 statistic in D&D is just one of those things (if you’re a slightly younger player, ask your parents. THAC0 is old skool D&D the way Original Nerds played). THAC0 is a chart that expresses probabilities of something happening. You roll a die, get your magic number, and if you beat it you win. Those numbers were mathematically derived and follow a logic, but nobody really knows the logic per se. They mostly just memorize their magic number out of a chart of 120 or so combinations. The really elite nerd could memorize a half dozen or so numbers and know when to use them.

Bolt sizes tend to follow a similar pattern. Vehicles use all sorts of nut sizes in different places and the reasons behind this size here vs that size there can be arcane and seemingly arbitrary. Why is this nut ½” and that one a mere 1/16” larger? Was that strictly necessary (in fact if you work on a modern Japanese car you learn that like 80% of the bolts are a 10mm, so I’m thinking it isn’t strictly necessary at all)? Why aren’t all nuts measured in quarters? I’m sure there are good, logical, sound, engineering reasons behind it but mostly it just seems made up. The only way to cope with this sort of thing is either memorize which socket for which bolt or look at the book…. And most of us don’t have time for any dumb book.

One of John’s uniquely impressive skill sets is memorizing all those little bits of numbers for both imaginary swords and real life bolts. Both are equally useful in day to day life. We needed to pull the plugs to see if we were getting spark. John said, “I think it’s a 13/16ths.” It’s the exact same tone he’d have used years ago when someone had to roll against a -2 Armor Class. I was kind of excited because I’m pretty sure that’s the first time I’ve ever touched my 13/16 inch socket.

Side note here: I bet you could make a game show on one of those car centered cable channels where contestants had to answer what is the correct bolt size for various bits and parts on a car. It’d be like a spelling bee, but for car nuts. You could even phone a friend. I’d watch that show.

We pulled the plug and decided to try to ground it out on the block, crank it a couple of times, and see if we got a spark. The plug kept slipping off the block because gravity is a harsh mistress. Luckily the good people at MG put a housing right there you can use to wedge the thing in. I’m led to believe that originally held an air pump of some sort, but I’ve never seen one personally. I’ve wondered a time or two if you couldn’t mount a small fold up table there, maybe with a magnet for holding random screws. Or maybe put a blender mount for tail gating. It could run off the fan belt somehow. Let’s be honest, there’s a LOT of room in the engine bay for accessories. The end result is that we mostly, kinda, sorta had spark, when gravity stopped getting in the way.

This has led to the inexplicable conclusion that I have bad gas. Now I gotta get the bad gas out and put some good gas in.